The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1900: Problem Solved

The sun was beginning to beat down on New York City on a typical summer morning in 1893, casting long shadows among the tall, stone-and-brick buildings. The city was alive with the hustle and bustle of horsecars navigating through New York's labyrinth of streets. By this time, New Yorkers were making over 100 million horsecar trips each year, a far cry from the 35 million a decade earlier.

New York had become a city of horses, with more than 150,000 of them plodding its streets, each producing, on average, 22 pounds of manure daily. That was approximately 45,000 tons of manure produced each month in the city alone. On Liberty Street, the manure pile had reached an appalling height of seven feet. Vacant lots were transformed into manure mountains towering 40 to 60 feet high.

As the summer heat intensified, the city streets, layered with manure, seemed to simmer, emitting a noxious stench that held the city hostage. To quote Edith Wharton from The Gilded Age Revisited, “The stench of horses was an omnipresent part of life, an almost living entity that pervaded our nostrils daily. It was a potent brew of manure and urine, enough to make the most ironclad stomach wretch.”

When it rained, rivers of manure would flood the streets, often creeping into basements and contaminating homes.

Predictions about the future of the “Great Horse Manure Crisis” were grim. One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure would reach the level of Manhattan’s third-story windows.

The problem seemed insurmountable.

And it wasn’t limited to New York. In England, The Times newspaper predicted in 1894 that, “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”

Then, in the early years of the 20th century, hope began to glimmer. A new form of technology, the automobile, began to make its presence felt. Silent, swift, and, most importantly, clean, these machines promised a solution to the problem that had plagued the city for decades.

With the development of the internal combustion engine suddenly there were new ways to move people and goods around.

By 1912, the number of automobiles in New York outnumbered horses. The city's last horse-drawn streetcar made its final run in 1917. The mountains of manure that had once been a fixture of city life began to disappear, and the pungent odor that had once permeated the city started to fade.

The once predicted demise of New York City buried under horse manure was but a distant, grim memory.

Instead, the streets were filled with the hum of engines and the honking of horns. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner summed up this story in their book SuperFreakonomics:

“When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lie right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong."